Hello Everyone: I have come to this forum 'green' with inexperience and with 'great expectations'. I have set up a Lenovo W510 with Ubuntu Studio 17.04. Above all other instruments, I want (need) to get a sampler working for me. I am an old hardware-sampler user. I have tons of samples. What I am hoping to find is a good tutorial about making sure that QSampler (which I found in the Ubuntu Studio toolchest) is fully and correctly set up for use, and usable, and after that, a tutorial on how to use it. I hope that such fundamentals have already been spelled out for 'newbies' like myself. If so, I'll be much less inclined to burden people in these forums with questions about fundamentals that might be obvious to everyone but myself. I am not an old-time Linux user, although I have learned a bit about it in the course of getting set up. I'll be travelling and hope to be able to use this laptop setup to keep making music along the way. I want to keep things simple and functional. I'll be using an Akai MPKmini for triggering.

Is QSampler a standalone instrument, or does it need to be opened inside of an environment like Ardour 5? (As you all can see, I know nothing about this).

As it comes in Ubuntu Studio, is the QSampler fully set up, or do I need to install other software or libraries or parts to make it fully functional?

I'd be happy to study any tutorials or documents on these subjects if there are such things and if someone would be kind enough to point it/them out to me.

Welcome Zeugitai.The most important thing here is to research, dig, ask questions and so forth.Most of what you may want to do, can be done. You just need patience to try things out.I also was a hardware-sampler user stemming from the early 1990's till about 2007.I've converted my entire personal library to the .gig format so as you might of guessed, linuxsampleris the backbone of my setup. Qsampler is the linuxsampler graphical user interface (GUI). You need linuxsampler and you wont find in the debian or ubuntu repositories. The kxstudio-repository @ http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/Repositories will hopefully give you what you need. If you plan on using the sfz or sf2 library format, then you'll be ok. On the other hand, if you're going to roll with .gig format and want to edit your preset while you play, you might have an issue with linuxsampler from the kxstudio repos. I had issues with it so i started compiling linuxsampler for use on debian stable.Hopefully i didn't overwhelm you and by all means....ask!!!

What the difference between these three formats? I'd choose the one that is the easiest/simplest to use.

Yes, it really is a question of time and patience. I'm not happy that it takes so much time away from actually trying to make music, but until I can afford a better system, I have little choice.

How did you 'convert' all your samples to .gig format? I have many samples in Akai s-type format, as I used primarily the S-01 and the S-1000 samplers. I'd love to get them all converted and usable on my system.

The difference for me at face value is the ability to play and edit the instrumentwith in the daw and the .gig format offers that. If you really want to know the tech specs on all 3 then Google is your friend .

My library was converted using a program called cdxtract on a G4 apple powermac computer.There are tools in linux that might help you.... all with in the linuxsampler environment.

Check under "Tools" for "akaidump" or "akaiextract". It's a great way of getting into the belly of the beast .

In terms of "E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)" from the guitarix_2%3a0.35.6+git20170910v5_amd64.deb package.I'm going to make the assumption you have enabled kxstudio repos. You're better off asking him as he's the package maintainer.

You're right about the KXStudio repositories. I forgot which Internet tutorial recommended and showed how to add the repositories for the sake of some additional audio functionality. Why that would incapacitate Guitarix still puzzles me, but I will go ask about it.